Early birds: Deepak Ravindran

It was a regular day in college. Deepak Ravindran and his friends were lounging in the corridor after class when the resident college beauty walked by. “I asked my friends how I could impress her,” recalls Ravindran, then a third-year student at the Lal Bahadur Shastri College of Engineering in Kasargod, Kerala. “Google it,” a friend replied. But Ravindran wasn’t carrying his laptop — he only had his phone and had no access to the Internet.

That’s how a business idea was born. It struck Ravindran that less than 10 per cent of Indians have access to the Internet, but everyone has a mobile phone. So how about providing Google-style information through text messages?

Ankit Fadia

“We started coding the next day and created a prototype, which we called SMSgyan,” says Ravindran, who co-founded Innoz Technologies with three friends. The company began operations from the college computer library.

When SMSgyan was selected for an incubation programme at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad, Ravindran and his friends decided to drop out of college and become full-time entrepreneurs. The information-on-the-go SMS service was launched by Airtel last year. “When other telecom operators started coming to us for tie-ups, we decided to make it a universal service,” says the 25-year-old CEO.

Innoz charges Re 1 per text message and has answered 400 million queries so far — ranging from the best shopping places in Bangalore, the square root of five and sex queries to, of course, how to impress a looker.

The company, with offices in Bangalore, Delhi and Mumbai, earned Rs 6 crore last year. “Of this, 60 per cent was profit. We plan to launch the service in Dubai and are exploring markets in Africa as well,” says an upbeat Ravindran.

Industry watchers call it the tycoon-at-20 phenomenon. “It’s a Silicon Valley trend that has been imported to India. Students are dropping out of college to start companies,” says Ravindran.

It’s happening because India now offers an eco system similar to the hot seat of American technology, adds the young, sneaker-totting CEO. “It’s easy to be an entrepreneur. All you need is brains, fire in the belly and a laptop.”

Ankit Fadia’s swinging career chart is a case in point. The 26-year-old professional hacker — who provides cyber security training to 80 corporate clients and is CEO of the Ankit Fadia Certified Ethical Hacker program — began his career when he was gifted a laptop on his 10th birthday. “I got hooked to hacking,” recalls the Mumbai-based hacker, who launched a website on hacking at 12 and authored The Unofficial Guide to Ethical Hacking when he was 14.

Fadia’s book brought him instant fame. Companies began seeking his services to beef up computer security. Fadia was in his teens and in business.

Sanjay Vijaykumar

The global technology boom has been instrumental in turning 20-somethings into corporate titans, believes Pranay Gupta, joint CEO, Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE) at IIM, Ahmedabad. “Most companies started by young entrepreneurs are in the technology domain. No one understands technology better than the youth,” he says. “Start-ups are not frowned upon any longer. Even if an enterprise fails, its creators are appreciated and can easily land great jobs.”

Gupta points out that funds and facilities — including training programmes — are easily available for young, wannabe entrepreneurs. The CIIE runs an annual iAccelerator programme for new entrepreneurs. “We select people with promising business ideas, hand-hold them in establishing a company and provide the initial funding,” he says.

Started in 2009, 26 companies have been through the programme. “Although there is no age restriction for candidates, 99 per cent have come straight out of college,” Gupta adds.

One of them was Ankit Gupta — who set up Innovese Technologies in his third year of engineering at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (Bits), Pilani. His business idea — Yo!Captcha — was about captcha advertising. All online registration forms have a captcha question at the end — a set of distorted letters or digits that have to be deciphered by the user. “We wrote the software to put an advertisement in the captcha space. The website could earn revenue from this,” explains Ankit Gupta. The product, launched in January last year, has been sold to 15 clients so far.

Colleges are doing what they can to encourage student entrepreneurs too. Six years ago, Bits launched a Centre for Entrepreneur Leadership — to provide support to start-ups. “Bits does not have a policy of compulsory class attendance. We had a lot of free time, which many used to do freelance work or start small firms,” says the 22-year-old CEO of Yo!Captcha.

A Thiruvananthapuram-based technology hub — Technopark — is leasing office space to young companies at minimal rentals. “There are 136 such companies at Technopark. Of these, 130 are student entrepreneurships,” says Technopark chief financial officer K.C.C. Nair.

The companies — which operate in information technology and related services, and bioinformatics — are leased space for three years. Nair says that together they have generated employment for 4,500 people and brought investments of Rs 95 crore into the park.

Sanjay Vijaykumar had no lofty business plans when he sold mobile connections and recharge coupons to fellow students at the College of Engineering in Thiruvananthapuram. “In one year, we sold 14,000 connections and earned Rs 8 lakh,” he recalls. Like any 21-year-old, Vijaykumar used half the money to buy a motorbike and a swanky phone. With the rest, he started a company — MobMe Wireless Solutions.

Farrhad Acidwalla

MobMe worked in the telecom domain and made money doing movie promotions on SMS and selling ringtones. In 2010, it won Nasscom’s emerging company award. With 750 employees in 17 cities, it earned Rs 25 crore revenue in the last financial year.

MobMe is now an anchor partner in an incubation centre for telecom start-ups — Startup Village — being set up in Cochin through a public-private partnership. “We aim to incubate 1,000 start-ups in 10 years,” the 26-year-old CEO says.

But India, he adds, has a long way to go on the incubation front. Of the 5,000 incubators in the world, 2,000 are in the US and 1,000 in China. India has 65. “We need about 1,000 incubation facilities in the country to make the start-up culture a success.”

Farrhad Acidwalla, however, became an entrepreneur by fluke. Acidwalla started an aviation website when he was 13, which he sold a few months on. He followed it up by starting and selling two more websites. “I realised I was doing something right. So I floated a company when I was 15,” says the CEO of Rockstah Media, a Mumbai-based web development and social media management firm.

Not everyone, though, is impressed by the new breed of 20-something titans. “We over romanticise the tycoon-at-20 phenomenon,” says Subroto Bagchi, who co-founded IT firm MindTree Consulting when he was 43. “It’s important to pace yourself. As you grow older you know more and are also more mature to deal with adversities,” adds Bagchi, whose book MBA at 16: A Teenager’s Guide to Business was published in April this year.

But the new generation — literally going from ABC to CEO — clearly believes that age and profits in business are inversely proportional.